Please join Small Talk Collective for a party, pop-up exhibition and live photographic collaboration on May 10th from 6:00-9:00pm at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center.

We will display our ongoing collaborative project “Conversations” for one night only! Additionally, we will reserve space for a live photo conversation open to everyone. Bring an image on your phone and we will make a 4x6 print for you to add to the wall. Make a connection or respond to someone else’s photo and watch how this visual web builds organically throughout the evening!

And if you haven’t purchased We’re Always Touching by Underground Wires, we will have signed copies available at the event.

This is the third and final installation of our RACC Project Grant, which began with our book launch and current exhibition at Pushdot Studio for Portland Photo Month. We hope you’ll join us for a night of celebration.

We are so beyond words excited to let you know that our book is officially available for pre-order!

If you are in Portland, choose "pick up at Pushdot" to avoid paying for shipping. Plus, if you come see us on Friday, you get food, mead from Nectar Creek, and the gratitude of seven photographers in person! (We'll even sign your book.)

Remember: Exhibition opening + book release at Pushdot Studio on April 6th from 6-8 pm.

Pre-order pricing runs through April 6th at 11:59pm so get those orders in now!

If you aren't able to pick up your book in person, we'll ship all pre-orders by Monday, April 9th.

Thank you all for the ongoing support! We can't wait to share this new work with you.

Please join us at Pushdot Studio for our first joint exhibition and book release!

In this time of redefining and bringing together the photography community in Portland, we are focusing on supporting and empowering one another as artists, entrepreneurs, and women. We invite you into a conversation – both visual and societal – around the strength of joining individual visions in order to speak to broader human desires and themes, including empathy, belonging, memory, and transformation.

This exhibition and book release (and the upcoming community event at Disjecta in May) are supported by a generous Project Grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council.

We believe strongly in the importance of supporting and empowering one another as artists, entrepreneurs, and women and we invite you into a conversation – both visual and societal – about the strength of joining individual visions in order to speak to broader human desires and themes, including empathy, belonging, memory, and transformation.

We’re Always Touching by Underground Wires opens at Pushdot Studio in Portland, OR with a First Friday reception and book release on April 6th from 6-8pm in conjunction with Portland Photo Month.

If you can't make it for First Friday, come by anytime Mon - Fri 8:30 am to 5:00 pm between April 6 – May 28.

We are also very excited to release our first book together. (Because who doesn't want to shoot a new body of work, plan a show, and publish a book in the span of three months?!)

Seven artists all in one place. Order by 11:59pm on April 6th to get in on the pre-order special! (link is on the left side of the page, under our names)

A few words about the project: Change is incremental, barely noticed, until it’s sudden and irrevocable. A house slowly ages and wears, until abruptly, it’s demolished and gone. Inside our own homes, we find imperfections and repairs, evidence of former occupants and our former selves. We feel these transitions and make new connections: between a bird discovered in a field and one dismembered by a cat, between the furrows on a face and those on the landscape, impressions left on skin and in memory. We look for change and find its mark. We look at what is, attempting to find the shape of what was.

Save the date: May 10 from 6-8pm!

Join us at Disjecta and bring one of your images to print and add to the community conversation. Any size and subject matter as long as you have it on your phone (for printing purposes). More details coming soon on our blog, Facebook, and Instagram.

The book, exhibition at Pushdot, and community conversation at Disjecta are supported by a generous Project Grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council. THANK YOU, RACC!

Once upon a time (also known as two years ago), Kristina Hruska reached out to six other photographers and asked them to be part of a group based on peer critique, collaboration, support, accountability, and mutual inspiration. We now call this little adventure Small Talk Collective. We recently got to sit down with Sarah Borst for the first ever audio interview for Ain't Bad Magazine! We chatted about photography, of course, intersectional feminism, art as a tool for healing or for activism, and the importance of community, especially in a very digitally-focused world. (And cats. We also talked about cats.)

This group has grown from a concept, to a community, to a sisterhood and we are so grateful to have the chance to keep the conversation going.

To listen to the interview and see some additional work from each of us, follow the link to Ain't Bad Magazine!

Small Talk Collective's Leslie Hickey was recently award a Civita Fellowship through the Civita Institute in Seattle. In October she will travel to Civita di Bagnoregio, Italy for a one month fellowship; she will use her 4x5 and black and white film to focus on capturing the landscape at night.

Small Talk member Briana Cerezo, along with Ross Lee Chappell, and Jennifer Rabin are the artists-in-residence working on a collaborative project with support from Newspace Center for Photography and Oregon Historical Society to explore how place, history, and story—which all converge in OHS’s archives—affect individual and collective identities. The artists are specifically looking at the ways that the archives have included and excluded different communities. Whose history is being recorded and whose is being erased? Whose is represented and whose is misrepresented? Which communities are attempting to tell the stories of others and which communities are largely self-representing?

The artists are making portraits of Oregonians across the state and listening to their thoughts about why sharing stories matters, when they feel seen and unseen, and who they want to tell and keep their stories. They especially want to include as wide a generational span as possible, so connecting with youth is a priority. The work will culminate in a show at Newspace in October and November 2017 followed by traveling public programming.

Hello! Thanks for visiting! I'll keep this first post short - we want you to follow us on Instagram! Each of us has been assigned one day of the week to create a post using only our phones, and with the majority of us starting as film shooters or super attached to our fancy digitals, this is not as easy of a task as you might think. Follow along to see our daily lives and interests - at least what we deem is worth taking a photo of! Plus, this is our first collaborative project together, and you get to witness its progress. Link in menu... do it!